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Cooltong

Today’s Terrific weather saw me and my oldest lad Josh head out in to the scrub to activate the Cooltong Conservation park, for the VK5 Parks award. (Josh needs to get his hours up on his “L” plates so he was keen to be my chauffeur!) . Access is via Santos Rd, off the Sturt Highway, a few km’s out from Berri towards Renmark past the Gun Club.

Cooltong CP entrance…

This is a dune and Mallee scrub park, some 3700 Hectares and is home to many wonderful species of birds and animals. It’s not that far from my home and Josh had us there in about 20 minutes. The road is quite good for a few Km into the park where it starts to deteriorate somewhat but all in all it’s quite serviceable, especially if you have a 4WD or a capable SUV. In summer I would imagine that it would be passable to most vehicles but the recent heavy rains had still left the road boggy in sections with water still in the many ruts.

cruising in the scrub…

After finding a good spot I set up the squid pole and the End Fed Half Wave antenna with the FT817ND and started calling CQ…I use the iPad for SOTA goat alerts and many other tasks…I log the calls in a paper notebook!

The EFHW ready to go…

The trusty FT817ND safe and snug in its Crumpler bag…

I was rewarded quickly with several stations, including a few out on SOTA summits – Nice!…the sun on my back was delicious!!!

I ran in to a few issues…1. 40 M with the introduction of SOTA is now VERY busy with stations all over the central bit of the band – finding a spot to call CQ can be a challenge!!! 2. Morons tuning up over the top of other stations…3. Even bigger Morons calling CQ on a very obvious “in use” frequency. One particular VK2 F-call was displaying all the qualities of getting his foundation licence from a cereal box!!! 4. Splattering stations…some were so bad they were being heard many KCs away…and yes my noise blanker and preamp were OFF!!!

Still bags of fun though, and always nice to pick up a few SOTA summits as part of the deal. Might have to look at operating up higher to escape the hordes around 7.085 – 7.110 Mhz

I also think I’ll try a dipole next time just to see if it’s any vast improvement over the EFHW. Although the EFHW works a treat, it seem those running a dipole get a bit stronger reports over all…either that or make a better effort at getting the far end of the top section higher or actually running the EFHW as an inverted “V” instead of an “L”

I’m thinking I might be getting some cancellation of radiation if the angle off the “L” bit of the wire is less than 90 degrees at the top of the squid pole (see the 3rd Photo)…something to experiment with!!!